BEACH
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The following excerpt from the diary: "It is the constant presence of the writer in the intellectual commentator that guarantees the flavor of knowledge, the mellifluous literary fruition of embodied ideas (of the impure subject of the diary's sentences), the corporeal and vestural text of the ultimate emblems of consciousness." When I write, I dispense germs, a kind of seed that returns the verb to the general circulation of seeds. There is no positive rule for recognizing the varying degrees of affinity found between a poet's favorite thoughts and the fantasies of his compositions. He travels, in spirit, through space and time. He travels through the bitter winter night of the snow-covered plains, traveling to Terry and then Glendive, Montana. Some passengers had actually shown up only at this last stop in Montana, and soon we were in Beach, North Dakota, on a melancholy night with a cold moon. As important as memory is, it fades before the imagination. Things once observed are reborn on paper, transfigured: in some cases, I had truly seen the world; in others, the soul had revealed the world to me as an Aleph. The most accurate painter in Florence had never been to Florence. Any writer can magnificently describe the sands, palm trees, and mirages of the desert without ever having traveled from Dan to the Sahara. Everything was explained in the Treatise on Will: the plan and the operating method, as well as the electric sensation Mesmer always felt when approaching people, which had been the origin of his discoveries about magnetism. The "crazy note" according to the "floating writing." Pure observation, without any vibration of arrogance, meaning, or ideology. Like a succession of Mr. Koan flashes... enigmatic stories or incomplete, lacking a moral but a strong virtuality of meaning. The mysteries of Isis, of Delphi, in the cave of Trophonius. Illuminated by this sudden clarity, my ideas take on broader proportions, engaging and cautioning the reader. I divide scattered truths from my mad notes and gather them together; then, like a smelter, I organize the block and activate its resource of poetic self-absorption, of the pregnancy of words. Ceaselessly contained in this expansion of consciousness, the block of words sinks into itself, making me seem like a cold, deceitful, and furtive writer (the sudden revelation of the powers of solitude, of the psychic energy that devours itself and is reborn from itself, incessantly).
Post scriptum
ResponderExcluirThe writer is a scribe of something he doesn't know.
ResponderExcluirJorge Luís Borges
"We see in the first line—I don't know Greek—of Homer's Iliad, which we read in the much-censored version of Hermosilla: 'Sing, Muse, the wrath of Achilles.'" In other words, Homer, or the Greeks we call Homer, knew, knew, that the poet is not the singer, that the poet (the prose writer, the writer) is simply the scribe of something he doesn't know, and which in his mythology he called The Muse. In contrast, the Jews preferred to speak of the Spirit, and our contemporary psychology, which doesn't get sick from excessive beauty, of the Subconscious, the Collective Unconscious, something like that. But ultimately, the important thing is that the writer is a scribe; he receives something and tries to communicate it. What he receives isn't exactly certain words in a certain order, as the Jews wanted, who thought each syllable had been prefixed. No, we think of something much vaguer than that, but in any case, of receiving and communicating something.
Jorge Luís Borges.
Post Scriptum
ResponderExcluirExploring this issue is all the more important for us as we recall that André Breton, the "father" of the Surrealist movement, suggested that Surrealism "rests on a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until then, in the powerful power of the rupture of the habitual level of consciousness, in the disinterested play of active and creative meditation of thought." Only those artists who attempted to give initiatory imagination and higher states of consciousness a fundamental—and therefore liberating—role in their compositions held genuine interest for the early Surrealists (such as Bosch). Because what interested and grounded them was the transfiguration and interpenetration of the two planes of consciousness into one.
The Eastern Paradigm of Scripture
ResponderExcluirThe great French Islamologist Henry Corbin presents us with the pattern of an ontognoseological dualism that takes us back to the Platonic worldview; the difference between the true (haqîqat) and the apparent (majâz):
"Coming into this world" is passing from the world of Reality in the true sense of the term (haqîqat) to the world that is undoubtedly real to everyday consciousness but, in essence, is nothing more than representation and metaphor (majâz); this "coming into the world" means that Reality in the true (profound) sense becomes doubtful and improbable, suspect and ambiguous for the purposes of social acceptance. This is why Jesus said: "I have come to bring the sword, not peace" (a symbolic sword, obviously: of the Logos or Word). IONESCO wrote that, with his theater, he proposes above all to DESOCIALIZE – see DON JUAN in his repeated sermons in this sense to CASTANEDA – because it is precisely the "everyday representation" of the social man that makes him a psychologically susceptible creature. He used traditional time-release mechanisms, such as Zen koans and any and all UPAYA (trick, strategy) that produced an "implosion of mental habits."
What has been described thus far fully coincides with the Platonic concept of "anamnesis," as well as the Gnostic conception of existence. From this perspective, the world of ordinary consciousness (the common waking world) actually constitutes a "self-reflexive mirrorism"; an illusion whose totalizing and invasive character leaves what is authentically Real forgotten. But this condition is reversible, as proposed below:
ResponderExcluirRising to the true world will mean that darkness and doubts will be uprooted from consciousness. Reaching the elevated state of awareness that each of us possesses within us as a seed is, eo ipso, becoming a stranger to the world of "social representation" and the "cognitive descriptions and interpretations" with which we clog our minds until there is no free space left for self-work and the "breathing of the soul." It is crucial that we free our memory from the false stories and false myths of success that the social value system has imposed on us. To undo this, it is necessary to obtain (or recover) the perceptive fluidity that the knot in our attention truncates with pseudo-concerns and fears produced by the increase in self-importance and the expenditure of psychic energy with the social defense of the EGO... The strategy of blurring (erasing) personal history (in many initiatory traditions) and everything it implies is well illustrative of this process of dissolving the structures of the ego within the limits of the world... (although the price is usually a little high: slander, defamation, misunderstandings (regrettable (!), by the way) and, mainly, INDIRECT MESSAGES ON FACEBOOK constitute the ordeal of this type of advanced practice lol... but that's okay!)
ResponderExcluirBut what does all this have to do with my text? To answer this question, we pay attention to the sense in which Corbin uses the terms "metaphor" and "representation" to describe the very nature of the illusory world: this already clues us in to the fact that there is a correspondence between the duality manifested in Existence (the true (haqîqat) and the apparent (majâz)) and an analogous duality that manifests itself in the TEXT. Since this supposedly "literary" concept, the "textual" is inextricably linked to the spiritual. On the other hand, the French philosopher mentions the Quran here, because the Revelation granted by Allah to the Prophet (Peace be upon him!) is precisely the original and sacred model, for Islamic gnosis, of this type of dualism of texts. ·
ResponderExcluirAnd a revealed text is clearly a superlative example of what constitutes an inspired text: its authors, the prophet and the seer writer, coincide in exercising a mediation between the plane of human common consciousness and a higher plane, whether of a single divinity, or of the multiplicity of gods, or of the Daimons, the Angels, or the jinn. Both Avicenna and, for example, Julio Cortázar enter into this same dynamic, each in their own way, each to their own extent, and their texts are the visible result of this mediation.
Artaud writes: "It is necessary to admit that language has ossified, that words, ALL WORDS, have frozen and become trapped within their own meaning, in a schematic and sterile terminology. ·
ResponderExcluirEvery time Cortázar comes into contact with AXEL, he turns from the reflective or narrative to the truly poetic, to the language he reveals, possessed by disturbing forces and endowed with a mantic conformation that is anything but reassuring (...) every time he feels the gravitation of this force that decenters him and deports him to the INDESCRIBABLE and UNSPEAKABLE, every time that nebulous NUMEN from which the manifest emerges becomes evident (...) the triggering of that which comes from beyond or from the depths, every time he notices THE UNTRANSLATED ANNOUNCEMENT, that which presents itself as possession or contagion, which claims its unknowable predominance, Cortázar can only account for it by stammering with a broken voice, he can only resort to pythic utterance (p. 154).
In this regard, Corbin offers us on page 34 what could constitute an avant la lettre version of chapter 82 of Rayuela (Hopscotch):
ResponderExcluirA source of powerful psychic energy is needed for imaginative activity (this imagination that... can be angel or demon) to create, outside the common expressions and superficial symbolisms that binary language allows, a sufficient field of inner freedom (...) The event will occur in a mental vision, in an intermediate state between wakefulness and dreaming.
The ancient Toltecs knew of this form of "automatic" knowledge, spontaneous and immediate, which dispensed with lines of reasoning, prior information, and formal logic. They called it inner silence.
Internal dialogue is the other half, a virus that prevents even subvocal speech from stopping: "Try to achieve at least ten seconds of inner silence." You will struggle with a resistant internal virus that forces you to talk compulsively and what is worse: always the same self-referential bullshit, like: I am this, I am that, I do this, I think that, I have this, I need to have that, etc. This virus is the internal dialogue and reactive thinking in the face of other people's behavior.
The virus of social control disables the centers of the nervous system necessary for the unfolding of consciousness and creates an addiction to internal dialogue, as if playing a scratched vinyl record that always loops back to the beginning of the track "I."
ResponderExcluirThus, we find ourselves faced with a paradigm of understanding narrative writing that is radically different from that which remains in force in the context of Western modernity.
Cortázar was able to see in this INITIATIC IMAGINAL something like a justification of the ontological reality of his own glimpses of another reality. Thus, he himself, like those other visionary authors he admired (Rimbaud, Nerval, Artaud...), did not live in a world of pure fantasy, as their contemporaries might mistakenly believe. What actually happens is that these seers had privileged access to a blocked dimension of reality. ·
It is an "external world," which is not the physical world, a world that teaches us that we can leave the sensible space without leaving its limits, and that it is necessary to leave the homogeneous time of chronology to enter the qualitative time that is the history of the soul (id.)
For the modern reader—and especially for Cortázar's reader—this "descending path" undertaken primarily by the author should not seem entirely strange, since the concept of inspiration is still familiar to us (familiar, if inoperative). The reader's case is different: there is currently no term for the "ascending path" that the reader must secondarily travel, and yet this ascent should constitute precisely the defining task of the "active and complicit reader." There is no modern term for it. But it is clearly present in the ancient Islamic spiritual context analyzed by Cortázar: it is Ta'wil (Islamic spiritual hermeneutics).
ResponderExcluir(...)
Post Scriptum
ResponderExcluirThis notion of Mundus Imaginalis will prove indispensable. It presupposes a confluence of traditions, as well as many esoteric connections between Christianity and Islam, as well as the recognition of their Eastern affiliation—in both the metaphysical and geographical senses. This affiliation opens the perspective of a Third World between the intelligible and the sensible. In Islam, it is called "ÂLAM-AL-MITHAL," for which the Orientalist Henry Corbin coined the neologism "IMAGINAL" to differentiate it from the simple imaginary as conceived by modern psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis. This is by no means a mere psychic dream-like experience, as practiced by many surrealists in European literature at the beginning of the 20th century, but rather a true spiritual dream-like experience, of the same kind as that pursued by Rimbaud, Nerval, and Artaud.
POSTSCRIPTUM
ResponderExcluirWestern psychology, almost entirely, is only interested in states of consciousness other than the usual when they are pathological, that is, not integrated within the individual. Schizophrenia, psychoses, neuroses—this is the field these schools address.
Schools such as Jungian and transpersonal psychology are important exceptions, which, albeit timidly, take the first steps in the study of altered levels of consciousness in which consciousness does not fragment or decompensate, but rather EXPANDS or EXPANDS. In a primary sense, they still call these states trance, often considering them fleeting occurrences, like attacks that come and go.
But other, more sophisticated schools of psychology, such as Buddhist and Nagualist, understand that other states of consciousness exist, and we can not only engage in them but also expand our perception to such an extent that a new world unfolds before our eyes, expanded by our ability to perceive more, by having our connection with the Atman or Spirit cleansed and strengthened. It was William Blake who wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."
The joyful guiding principle of this blog
ResponderExcluir"Trust is born of knowledge."
Bruce Lee
Friends,
I am writing here one of Novalis's logological fragments, number 3, because I think it expresses the intentions of this blog's discussions very well.
"The letter is merely an aid to philosophical communication, whose very essence consists in the elicitation of a certain course of thought. The speaker thinks, produces - the listener reflects, and reproduces. Words are a deceptive means of pre-thinking - an unsuitable vehicle for a determined, specific stimulus. The genuine speaker is a wayfinder. If the listener is truly desirous of truth, only a beckoning is needed to make him find what he seeks. The exposition of philosophy therefore consists of pure themes - of initial propositions - principles. It is only for self-active friends of truth. The analytical development of the theme is only for the lazy or the inexperienced. The latter must learn to fly through it and maintain a determined direction. (...) Genuine philosophizing-together is therefore a common expedition toward a beloved world - in which we mutually take turns at the most advanced post, which necessitates maximum tension against the resistant element, in which we fly."
Once again, I turn to Novalis and Bruce Lee.
ResponderExcluir"No path for a path, no limit for a limit."
Bruce Lee
Once again, I turn to Novalis. This is logological fragment 21, which seems to me to be a proposal for a transcendental principle, which gives meaning, in the case of the Romantic proposal, to the poet-philosopher's poetry. You will notice that, despite being transcendent, the framework retains a profound subjectivity.
"There are certain fictions within us that seem to have a completely different character than others, for they are accompanied by a sense of necessity, and yet no external foundation is presented for them. It seems to the human being as if he were engaged in a dialogue, and some unknown, spiritual being were causing him in a prodigious way to develop the most evident thoughts. This being must be a superior being, because it relates to him in a way that is not possible for any being bound to phenomena. It must be a homogeneous being, because it treats him as a spiritual being and urges him only to the rarest self-activity. This superior self relates to man as man relates to nature, or as a sage relates to a child. Man longs to equal himself to it, just as he seeks to make the not-self equal to himself."
YEAH! Henry Corbin is the major european angiologist of all times.
ResponderExcluirQuoting Origen's discussion of the Transfiguration he notes that Jesus appeared in the form in which he was normally seen but also in his transfigured form "he appeared to each one according as each man was worthy."
ResponderExcluirThe core of Corbin's book is in essence the transformation of such a "gnosis" in Islamic, specifically Ismaili, soil. Having traced its origins in Zoroastrianism, Corbin goes on to discuss the connection between Zoroastrianism, Christianity (specifically Ebionite Christianity) and Islam (specifically Shi'ite and, more speficially, Ismaili Shi'ite) in a mindbending trip. Corbin has "no wish to debate the question of historical filiation...nor to determine the 'influences'" which, he says, "reads causality into things" (31). The connection between them is not doctrinal: it is a common angelology.
By angel he is not talking about the winged variety or the Touched By An Angel variety or any of those other media caricatures. For Corbin the "angel" is the "celestial Idea" of all human beings. Writing on Ibn Arabi, he says:
"...that which a human being regains in the mystical experience, is the "celestial pole" of his being, which is to say his "person" whereby and as which, the Divine Being from the very beginning in the origin of origins in the world of Mystery, manifested himself to himself, and made himself known to it in this Form [its own form, the form it was given to assume] which is equally the Form in which he knew himself in it. It is the Idea, or rather the "Angel" of his person whose present self is no more than the terrestrial pole."
And again:
"I am your own Daênâ", -which means: I am, in person, the faith that you professed and that which inspired it in you, she for whom you have answered and she who guided you, she who comforted you and she who now judges you, for I am, in person, the Image proposed to you from the birth of your being and the Image which finally you have yourself wished for ("I was beautiful, you have made me still more beautiful").
These paragraphs draw out the distinctions behind Corbin's aversion to traditional Christianity and its teaching of the singular event of the Incarnation of Christ. Rather than a universal, singular Christ, this Angel of which Corbin speaks is personal, unique to each soul, and is the Image to which the soul longs to unite.
ResponderExcluirHe further breaks down this angelology. Rather than being a "metaphorical luxury" the Angel's significance is twofold, theophanic and soteriological ("salvific"). It can be thought about in several ways. There are angels who have remained in the celestial world, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and other angels who have fallen to Earth. The angels in the celestial world (the pleroma) are "angels in actu" and the angels who are on earth are the "angels in potentia".
Another way of looking at it is that this division may refer to a single being, an unus ambo. The Spirit is the person or Angel who has remained in heaven, the "celestial twin", while the soul is his companion who has fallen to Earth, to whose help he comes and with whom he will be reunited if he issues victorious from the cosmic battle between good and evil. (103)
The human lot is thus, quoting Nasir Khusraw, a transitory status, the "horizon" of which Corbin speaks. Man is a "not-yet": an angel (or demon) in potentia awaiting reunion with his celestial twin, the angel in actu.
Heady? Yeah. And I can't do it justice. But there is a certain logic to it that is quite appealing. Rather than a heavenly Jesus to whom we turn, we all have inherent in us this "Idea" of perfection, this idea of the "Divine" and it is this "Idea" that Corbin terms the Angel with whom we seek union or re-union. It has been placed in us from the very beginning; it is this that guides us and it is to this we seek to return.
Corbin's main thrust is this:
"Man is called, by right of his origin and if he consents, to an angelomorphosis, his acceptance of which precisely regulates his aptitude for theophanic visions." (64)
It is this angelomorphosis (Corbin invents mroe than a few terms in this work) that is the key. Ismailian Gnosis, according to Corbin, in a sense saves a Christianity, specifically of the Ebionite variety, that had long ago been lost to the "paradise of archetypes".
The Faith of Henri Corbin is the faith of a gnostic for those who “gnosis is a saving knowledge in itself.” This faith is Tierra, Ángel, Mujer, as he wrote on April 24, 1932 on the edge of a lake in Dalecarlie: "All this is a single thing that I love and that is in this forest. The twilight over this lake, my Announcement. The mountain: a line. Listen! Something is going to happen, yes. Waiting It’s immense.”
ResponderExcluirLa Mujer
ResponderExcluirAs for the Woman, she has to do with the World of the Angel as much as with what Julius Evola calls “the Mysteries of the Woman”.
She has to see first with Stella Corbin, her woman since 1934 “Stellae consorte dicatum” such is the dedication chosen by Corbin for his edition of his work “Sobre el Islam iraní”. This confession will echo in 1978: "A long time ago, I was the editor and translator of Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz, of the incomparable mystical chanter, in Persian, of the high road of human love. It is through this high road that I can affirm that without the presence and cooperation of the companion that preserved me from solitude and from them We are discouraged, none of the work that has been written here has been possible.”
La Mujer de la Fe Henri Corbin belongs in turn to the Eternal Feminine, following Goethe in the second Faust, which “is even prior to the terrestrial woman, even though the supraceleste Tierra dominates all the terrestrial, celestial and terrestrial and preexistent.”
You have to see, finally, with Beauty and consequently with Loving Fidelity, which is Henri Corbin's secret mystery: "Every secret of human beauty, write, is there. There is no need to deviate from human beauty or deviate from it."
ResponderExcluir"We would be tempted to conclude, following Corbin, that the “imaginal world” offers men the highest degree of contemplation of the Divine Being that can be known. A supreme contemplation, but imperfect: however sublime it may be, the theophany in a lower imaginal form is not less formal and consequently, does not reflect, it is Increasing." To this critical reflection by Claude Abbas, Henri Corbin was quick to respond, stating: “It is not certain that one can maintain the dilemma between the encounter with the Supreme Personal God or the Experience of something Absolute, depersonalized or impersonal.” However, let us better compare the experience of Mansur Al-Hallaj, the “mystic martyr of Islam” as the caller Louis Massignon, to the “Unidad del Ser” (Wahdat al-wuyud) of Ibn Arabi.
Henri Corbin's position is halfway between them. For it “is the angelic mediation that is the very, necessary and ever unique form of the revelation of the hidden and inaccessible deity…”
There is a “mystique” that has to do with a “God known, a God loved” as well as the “beauty without the face of Christ”. This is how, as for Louis Massignon, “it is not just through the suffering of the mortal desire that the saint can access the union with the One, the unarmed, solitary, naked divine essence”.
ResponderExcluirThere is also an ecstatic dimension to which, as Ibn Arabi says in his Treatise on Unity regarding the Real Being: “See His existence for His existence”. It is in this sense that Maestro Eckhart declares in one of his sermons God in pure unity: "When now the soul, with this strength, perceives something in the form of images, it becomes an angel, it sees its own image, it is a question of weakness. That it contemplates God as God or as an image or as a trinity, it is one weakness. But when all images are separated from the soul and do not contemplate more than the One One, then the pure essence of the soul finds the pure essence of the divine unity stripped of all form, which is a supraesencial, passive essence, which rests within itself.”
Finally there is a “theosophical dimension” in which one can approach the inaccessible Reality through “theophanies”, and ultimately, through a Figure, a human Form. This is what Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz testifies to that “the hidden meaning of the human Form, is the primordial theophany”: God revealing himself in the Adamic Form, the celestial Anthropos evoked in preeternity and that is his own image”.
ResponderExcluirIt is this human Form that Henri Corbin's Ángel de la Fe takes us back to.
Tierra-Ángel-Mujer is finally the Fe of Henri Corbin. This Faith is a faith of the Resurrección. “But, then, without a doubt, a procession of very beautiful beings suddenly appeared from this lake. They will sing at Adán's funeral and given that Adán is dead, it will be said in a choir that will be joined by more and more voices, that in the hubo anguish in none of his moments: Christ has been born, Christ has risen!
Translation of the excerpt “Creative Imagination and the Mundus Imaginalis”, from the first chapter of the book All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (2012), by Tom Cheetham
ResponderExcluirHere!
Henry Corbin's gnoseology revolves around the thesis that the mode of consciousness that came to dominate Western culture from the 12th century onward is characterized by a critical split between "thought" and "being." This rupture occurred when Avicenna's Neoplatonic hierarchies were supplanted by Averroes's Aristotelianism. The Western world lost its angels, as he puts it; since then, we have been walking "in vagabondage and perdition." Perhaps the clearest example of the end result of this split is the Cartesian distinction between thinking substance and extended substance—res cogitans and res extensa. There now exist only two types of beings—physical and mental—and two modes of knowing—sensible perception and the categories of understanding. Descartes dodged the question of how these two substances might interact by saying, essentially, that "God does it" somewhere in the pineal gland.
ExcluirHeidegger idem
ExcluirThe fact is that much of Western philosophy has come to assume that "what" we think and "how" we know have no ontological effect on us. The epistemological goal has become the production of clear and distinct ideas about the ontologically homogeneous physical bodies that comprise the universe. This is the metaphysics that underpinned science and technology until the 20th century—and which, in more sophisticated forms, still does.
ExcluirBetween sensory perception and the intuitions or categories of the intellect, a void remained. What should have occupied this intermediate space—and which, in other times and places, actually did—namely, Active Imagination, was relegated to the poets.
ExcluirThere has long been no metaphysical system in Western thought that takes the activity of the Imagination seriously. In the cosmology that Corbin defends, Imagination provides access to a world where "the conflict between theology and philosophy, between faith and knowledge, between symbol and history" finds its resolution. He refers to Imagination as a true organ of perception. Without it, the phenomena of religious experience become impossible—it is the means by which we perceive symbols.
Active Imagination guides, anticipates, and shapes sensory perception; therefore, it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is a mere burning bush if perceived only by the senses. For Moses to see the burning bush and hear the Voice calling him “from the right side of the valley”—in short, for a theophany to occur—an organ of metasensory perception is necessary.
ExcluirThis is a simple yet monumental statement. It means that, for centuries, Western philosophy lacked the means to understand religion—and even less art—because Imagination was “abandoned to the poets,” who, along with all other artists, were marginalized and misunderstood by philosophers and scientists. A metaphysics that incorporates Active Imagination into the validation of reality is necessary to understand the meaning of vast dimensions of human experience:
On it depends […] the validity of visionary accounts that perceive and describe “events in Paradise”; the validity of dreams, of symbolic rituals, of the reality of places formed by intense meditation; of the reality of inspired visions; of cosmogonies and theogonies and, first of all, of the truth of the spiritual meaning perceived in the imaginative data of prophetic revelations.
Imagination, as an organ of perception, gives us access to a realm of real beings: an objective world that Corbin called mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. This is a neologism for the Arabic term 'alam al-mithal, used by Ibn 'Arabi and many others.
ExcluirHowever, the imaginal world is easily misunderstood as a more diaphanous and subtle version of the physical world. Although it is partly so—and Corbin dedicates many pages to describing this subtle plane—Active Imagination is also Creative Imagination. The exploration of this subtle realm requires a participation between the human and the divine: it is, at once, discovery and creation. This third mode of knowing heals the split we have learned to take for granted. This dual structure, the syzygy between the soul and its divine counterpart, is a central theme of Corbin's cosmology. And it is in prayer that Creative Imagination most fully realizes its role in human life. Corbin states:
It is precisely in this transformation of perception that the great fracture that divided the West is healed: the rupture between "thought" and "being." It is through Creative Imagination, in this specific sense, that we discover that the way of perceiving depends on the way of being of the perceiver. We are transformed profoundly, ontologically—at the core of our being—by the exercise of Active Imagination. And this allows us to see that which would otherwise remain invisible. Our great task, says Corbin, is "To become capable of God." [...]
ExcluirOf course, throughout history, there have always been defenders of the Imagination—but these have been relegated to the margins of dominant culture. Corbin frequently evokes mystics, alchemists, Neoplatonists, as well as figures like Böhme, Goethe, Henry More, and the Cambridge Platonists, Hamann, and Swedenborg. There is a struggle to keep the reality of the Imagination alive and resist the rising tide of instrumental rationalism that has dominated the modern world. As Corbin puts it:
Our Western philosophy has been the stage for what we might call "the battle for the Soul of the World"... But is this a case of a battle ultimately lost, with the world having lost its soul, and whose consequences weigh heavily on our modern worldviews, without compensation? Even if there has been a defeat, a defeat is not the same as a refutation.
ExcluirHowever, Christ, symbol of the self, necessarily speak of Christ here because He is the still-living myth of our civilization. He is the hero of our culture, who, without detriment to his historical existence, embodies the myth of the primordial man (Urmensch), of the mythical Adam. He occupies the center of the Christian mandala; He is the Lord of the Tetramorph, that is, of the symbols of the four Evangelists that represent the four pillars of their time. He is within us, and we are within Him. His kingdom is the precious pearl, the treasure hidden in the field, the small mustard seed that transforms into the great tree; it is the Celestial City. Just as Christ is, so too is His kingdom within us.
ResponderExcluirI think these few universally known references are sufficient to characterize the psychological position of the symbol of Christ. Christ elucidates the “archetype of the SELF.” He represents a totality of divine or celestial nature, a transfigured man, a perfect son of God (...) He constitutes an equivalence of the first Adam before the original fall, that is, when he still possessed the pure likeness of God, and about whom Tertullian says (222): “And as for this image of God, it can be admitted that the human spirit possesses the same impulses and the same sense as God, though not in the same form.” Origen (185-254) is much more detailed: “The imago Dei (image of God) imprinted on the soul and not on the body is an image of the image, “for my soul is an image of God, not in a singular way, but created in the likeness of a preceding image.” Christ, on the other hand, is the true imago Dei, in whose likeness our inner man was created: invisible, incorporeal, and immortal. The divine image manifests itself in us through prudentia, justitia, moderatio, virtus, sapientia, and discipline.
ResponderExcluirCarl Gustav Jung
For Jung, for the individuation process to occur, the ego must come into contact with the irrational and dark aspects of the psyche, which are often repressed, at a certain cost, but are not eliminated. These aspects are often projected onto the collective. To approach the self, these contents must be integrated, but this approach is still very distant; according to Jung:
ResponderExcluir"It is impossible to reach an approximate awareness of the self, because no matter how much we expand our field of consciousness, there will always be an indeterminate and indeterminable amount of unconscious material that belongs to the totality of the self. This is why the self will always constitute a magnitude that surpasses us." (Jung, C.G. vol. VII, & 274, Complete Works.)
A creative and open dialogue between the self and the ego is necessary for more shadowy aspects to emerge into consciousness, for the more one-sided a person's position, the more superficial they will be. To delve deeper into one's inner content and gain a deeper understanding of one's own personality, one must free oneself from moral and massified rigidity, be sufficiently rooted in the world through one's own efforts, have the courage to confront the shadow, and seek the animus or anima in order to achieve a higher union. However, for psychic content to emerge, Jung tells us that it is essential to utilize at least two "rational" functions:
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir“When, therefore, in the study of psychic contents one takes into consideration not only the intellectual aspect but also the value judgment, one necessarily obtains not only a complete picture of the respective content but also the special position it occupies in the scale of psychic contents. Affective value constitutes an extremely important criterion, without which psychology is impossible, because it determines, to a large extent, the role that the accentuated content will play in the economy of the psyche. Or rather, affective value functions as a barometer indicating the intensity of a representation, an intensity that, in turn, expresses the energetic tension, the action potential of the representation. The shadow, for example, generally has a markedly negative affective value, while the anima and animus, on the contrary, have a positive value.” (Jung, C.G. Vol. IX/2 & 53. Complete Works)
"Translation of the Aramaic m sihã and the Hebrew mãsiha, i.e., messiah. In the Old Testament, in addition to the high priest, the reigning sovereign is also called the "anointed one" of Yahweh. The psalms also speak of the anointed one several times, certainly referring to the historical descendants of the Davidic dynasty. However, as this royalty declined, the figure of an ideal, superhuman king emerged, and the texts of the psalms themselves gained a new interpretation. On the origin and evolution of this idea – Messiah. The disciples, recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, added this title to his name: "Jesus Christ," "Christ Jesus," or simply Christ. Ultimately, Christ became an independent name to indicate the glorified Kyrios.
ResponderExcluir(DEN BORN & CO., Encyclical Dictionary of the Bible, Vozes; 1985)
The Christ who is the object of Christian worship is the Jesus who lived and died in Palestine, but was also at the time much more than this. He was assimilated by the system and received the projection of the God-man expected by his contemporaries, thus becoming his archetypal expression. As David's reign was declining, those people needed a replacement, and so they waited for a messiah.
We have some archetypes that trace their origins in humanity back hundreds and thousands of years before Christ. Many tribal leaders managed to unite men and women in the face of catastrophic situations, natural disasters, or threats from enemies from other tribes, by awakening an archetypal, instinctive response. We could mention the archetype of evil, the savior, the warrior, and others considered primordial. Jesus Christ awakened this primordial response in some of his contemporaries, as someone who could free men and women from moral and spiritual evil. Although he resembled a long line of great human leaders, there was something specific and unique about him, something that brought him closer to the divine and has led him to be remembered and followed to this day. He incites an even deeper tendency to action, not only the savior archetype but also the archetype of the Self. As Jung tells us:
ResponderExcluirJesus became the figure expected by the unconscious of his contemporaries. Therefore, it is useless to try to know who he was and what he was like in his concrete reality. If his figure were reliable from a human and historical point of view, it would probably be as uninformative as that of a Pythagoras, a Socrates, or an Apollonius of Tyana. He appeared as the bearer of a revelation precisely because he presented himself as an eternal God (and, therefore, non-historical), and he could only act as such thanks to the unconscious consensus generalis (general consensus): if his contemporaries had not seen something special in the person of the miraculous Rabbi of Galilee, the darkness would not have realized that a light had shone. (Jung. C.G. Vol. XI & 228, Complete Works)
ResponderExcluirThats the point! APOLLONIUS of TYANA!
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ExcluirThis text was written by me as an adaptation of an excerpt from Flaubert's masterpiece THE TEMPTATIONS OF SAINT ANTHONY
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ExcluirAPOLLONIUS (87 AD)
Excluir(I obtained the entire doctrine of all time like a flash of lightning, a light traveled in the voice, in the fountain of Asbadeus, and my soul was rubbed by internal hearing even in a celibate machine of visions and remote listening to everything that happened in the world at the same time, and then came the visions of Olympus in the temple of Diana, and the suicide of the governor of Cilicia, who threatened to kill me and my family --- but three days later it was he who died, murdered by the Romans --- during the time of initiatory trials, I acquired and completely mastered the mantric secret of the Pythagoreans (the lines and points as sounds through which light travels) and I did not tremble, nor did I cower, under torture or in the desolation of the street or the theater, where even little children fled from me, when they considered me a ghost --- then I went to the Samaneans of the Ganges, the astrologers of Chaldea, the Babylonian magicians, the Gaulish druids, the Egyptian and Jewish priests --- all the Olympians, all the oracles, deserts and lakes --- from Scythia I went to the Hyrcanian Sea, I wandered through the country of the Baraomates, where they buried the horse of Alexander the Great (Bucephalus), and then to Nineveh---
Excluir---By then I knew all the languages and read every thought in people's minds---after Ctesiphantas, we entered Babylon, WHAT A CITY! Everyone in Babylon is rich! The houses have bronze doors and grand staircases that descend to the river: there are temples, squares, baths, aqueducts; the palaces in Babylon are covered in copper; and inside them, then, if only you could see what I saw! On the northern wall rises a tower that supports a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth---and three more! The eighth is a chapel where there is a bed: only the woman chosen by the priests for the god Belus may enter---and the king of Babylon hosted me right there---and what about those great mechanisms that convey water to the gardens? --- leaving Babylon, the moonlight was ghostly, and full of terrifying creatures from another world: with my gaze fixed on nothingness I drove away all evil, and continued on my way calmly --- in Taxila, capital of the five thousand fortresses, Praortes, king of the Ganges, showed us a guard of funny blacks and in the gardens of his palace an enormous elephant, which the queens perfumed, to amuse themselves: it was the elephant of Porus, escaped after the death of Alexander ---
Excluir--- Phraortes made us sit at his table, and made us watch drunken gentlemen who amuse themselves by shooting arrows under the feet of dancing children --- when I was ready to leave, the king said to me: "I have a stud farm of white camels in the Indus. When you no longer need them, all you have to do is blow in their ears. They will return alone!’’ --- so we went down along the river, walking at night in the light of the fireflies that shone in the bamboos --- a slave whistled a tune to scare away the snakes, and our camels bent low under the trees, as if under very low portals --- one day, a little black boy, who carried a golden staff in his hand, took us to the college of the wise men --- Iarcas, the chief, spoke of my ancestors, of all my thoughts, of all my actions, of all my existences: he had been the Indus River and made me remember that I had sailed boats on the Nile, in the time of King Sesostris --- since then, I acquired the vague aspect of an omniscient shadow crossing an uninteresting world --- yet, I found on the seashore the cynocephali regurgitating milk, and returning from their expedition to the island of Taprobana ---
Excluir--- the tepid waves rolled golden pearls at our feet, the amber crunched under our footsteps, whale skeletons whitened in the crevices of the cliffs, the land grew narrower than a sandal every day --- and after throwing drops of ocean water into the sun, we turned right to return --- we passed again through the region of the Aromatae, the country of the Gangarids, the promontory of Comaria, the region of the Sakallites, the Adramites, and the Homerites --- and finally, through the Cassian Mountains, the Red Sea, and the Topaz Islands, we entered Ethiopia through the kingdom of the Pygmies --- and when I returned to my country, everyone I knew had died --- it was around this time that much was being said about me in the world: the plague was ravaging Ephesus; I ordered the death of a beggar, and the plague ended --- in Cnidus, I cured the man in love with Venus: a madman who swore to marry the famous statue: I placed my hand on his heart and immediately the love faded --- in Tarentum, they were carrying a dead girl to be cremated: I touched her lips and immediately she arose calling for her mother --- and I predicted power to Vespasian ---
--- in Corinth, or in the waters of Baia, I don't remember exactly, a dog came in, biting a severed hand: NO!, one afternoon, in a suburb (wait, let me remember this correctly!): the dog circled slowly, yes, around all those beds, with that human hand in its mouth --- they wanted to chase it away, at the same time that young Menippus accompanied that beautiful and mysterious woman to her house, and there they made love --- beating its tail on the ground, the dog placed its hand on Flavius' knees --- in the morning, at school, Menippus was pale and sick, fainting during the lesson --- then I said to him: "O handsome young man, you caress a serpent and it caress you! When is the wedding?", and we all went to the wedding of Menippus and the woman --- right in the hall, the maids were turning, the doors opened, but there was no sound of footsteps, nor any sound of doors --- I went to Menippus and soon his bride became horribly enraged against me and all the philosophers ---
Excluir--- but the golden tableware, the waitresses, the cooks, the confectioners disappeared without explanation; the roof flew off, the walls crumbled, and I was left standing alone, with only that bride dissolved in tears at my feet: it was a vampire who satisfied the handsome young men to devour their souls, for there is nothing better for these ghosts than to suck the quintessence of the blood of lovers --- on the night we arrived in Rome, the city of the popes, a drunken man clung to us, singing softly: he was a verse writer of Nero who had the power to kill anyone who listened to him indifferently; he carried on his back, in a box, a string taken from the harp of the incendiary emperor --- I shrugged --- he threw mud in our faces --- then, I unbuckled my belt and handed it into his hands --- Emperor Nero, in the night, sent for me at the palace; I was playing dice with Sporus, reclining on my left arm on an agate table --- he turned to me, frowning his blond eyebrows, and said: "Why are you not afraid of me?", and I answered: "Because the God who made you terrible made me fearless" --- (then everyone realized with terror that there was something inexplicable about me, and there was a chilling silence) ---
Excluir--- all Asia, in fact, could bear witness --- I say: I saw, from Ephesus, the killing of Domitian, who was in Rome --- yes, in the theater, in broad daylight, on the fourteenth of the calends of October --- I suddenly exclaimed: "They are beheading Caesar!", and on that day, in fact, Titus Flavius Domitianus had been murdered, as is known --- ("And is that even possible?!!!" they later asked themselves "Without the help of the devil?") --- he wanted to have me killed, this Domitian, and I was put in prison by him, before his murder --- about the fifth hour of that day, the soldiers led me to the tribunal (I already had my speech prepared, under my cloak) --- Damis and other of my disciples were on the beach of Puzzolo (thousands of miles away), believing me already dead (they wept a lot) --- about the sixth hour of that same day, I appeared there, on that beach, and before them in the flesh I said: ‘’IT IS ME!’’ --- it is true that I am able to easily ascend to any heaven, of any tradition, thanks to the virtue that raises me to the height of the Universal Principle, which since Heraclitus the Ephesians have learned to call Fire --- I know all the gods, all the rites, all the prayers, all the Hindu tantras, all the Greek oracles --- I have penetrated the lair of Trophonius, son of Apollo ---
Excluir--- I kneaded for the Syracusan women the cakes they take to the mountains --- I endured the eighty-six trials of the cult of Mithra --- I pressed the serpent of Sabasius to my breast, I unveiled and manipulated the monster Ouroboros, I dominated all the sphinxes, I received the sash of the Cabiras --- I washed Cybele in the waves of the Camparian gulfs and spent three moons in the caves of Samothrace, penetrating the mysteries of the good goddess --- now, I will make a pilgrimage even greater than this, heading north, to the regions of swans and snows --- on the white plain, the blind hippopods crush with their toes the mysterious plant from beyond the sea --- it is already dawn!, or shall I go south?, beyond the mountains and the great waves, to seek in the maddening perfumes the lost reason for love --- to inhale the aroma of the myrrh that makes the weak die --- and bathe my body in the rose-colored lake of the island Junonia --- and I will see, sleeping on primroses, the lizard that only awakens from century to century, when the ruby on its forehead falls ripe --- the stars throb like eyes, the waterfalls sing like lyres, the open flowers intoxicate --- my spirit expands in the air, in my heart and on the skin of my face ---
Excluir--- I will teach villagers to understand, in amazement, the voice and cry of all animals, of all birds, and I will make living bronze serpents crawl on the ground, and all marble statues laugh in front of everyone, and at my feet, even street dogs will speak like human beings --- I will make entire peoples kneel before me --- I can (much better than Jesus) walk on the clouds and on the waves; I can pass through walls and enormous mountains in a second, make myself very young or very old, transform myself into a tiger or an ant, borrow the physiognomy of others, disappear into thin air, direct lightning! --- I know all the demons that inhabit caves, I am lord of all the devas, my nothingness has made me greater than all powers, all the demons that walk the woods worship the light and power of my Will, including the giant succubi that stir the waves of the sea, the deities above and below Poseidon, and the Elohim that drive furious storm clouds over cursed cities --- I can explain the reason for all divine forms in any point on earth --- I can tear the armor off any and every god and tear him to pieces ---
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Excluir--- I can force the door of any sanctuary with my shadow and voice from thousands of leagues away --- I have loved the bodies of thousands of Greek pythonesses driven mad by chewing laurel leaves --- to me, all those who believe in the reality of things and live their entire lives clinging and enslaved to these same things are foolish: the terror that the unknown causes them blinds them to the understanding of the wonder of the greater mysteries --- the most they can manage is to descend to the level of that presumptuous little king of the Jews who died on the cross not long ago --- above all forms, beyond the earth, beyond the heavens, resides the world of ideas, full of the Word!, the LOGOS SPERMATIKÓS! --- in a single leap, I cross the other space and swim in the infinity of the ABSOLUTE ETERNAL LIGHT!)
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ResponderExcluirThere is a passage that I was not able to transport because I had removed the Saint from my adaptation, which however made me laugh until I lost my breath when I read it--- it goes like this: APOLLONIUS: "You say that because you do not master the doctrine" ---THE SAINT: "Doctrine? What doctrine?!!!!!"
ResponderExcluirW.S.
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